‘By the honour of our saviour and the Blessed Virgin Mary,’ he invoked. ‘Make peace while you can, my gracious lord.’
‘Speak and be quick,’ the Prince replied. He didn’t even look at the cardinal — Talleyrand was at that time only slightly less powerful than the King of France. He might have been Pope. He certainly had more money than God. I doubt he was used to being told to speak and be quick.
I laughed.
Talleyrand glared at me.
The Prince was watching the crest of the hill to the north, which divided us from the King of France. Banners were starting to appear.
‘Give me one hour to make peace, my gracious lord. In the name of Jesus Christ.’ The Cardinal bowed.
The Prince turned from looking at the gathering French banners, the way a shipman might turn from watching a gathering storm. He nodded. ‘One hour?’ he asked, looking at me of all people.
‘Just one,’ Talleyrand said.
The Prince bowed. ‘I will hear your proposals if the King of France will do,’ he said.
Talleyrand took a cup of wine from my hand, drank it and put his hand on my head. ‘God’s blessing on you, child, even when you are rude to your betters.’
That’s how I met the great Cardinal, of whom John Hawkwood said, ‘He farts gold.’
After he rode away, the Prince took wine and water from me. He looked at my boots, which were wet from riding into the stream so many times. ‘Good water?’ he asked.
‘Yes, my Prince.’ Oh, how I remember those words. I was speaking to the Prince.
He nodded. ‘The Cardinal may speak to his heart’s content while we water our horses and have a bite,’ he said. He looked past me to Burghersh. ‘And then, my lords, we will pick up our banners and march — away.’
They nodded and smiled. Listen, my friends — we had loot and an intact army, and they outnumbered us four to one. While I served the Prince and his lords, I watched the far hill as they did, and we counted eighty-seven banners. King John of France had 12,000 knights. We had about 2,000 men-at-arms. Of belted knights, we had fewer than 800.
We had our archers, and they had a veritable horde of infantrymen, but their infantrymen, with the exception of the communal militias, weren’t worth a donkey’s watery piss.
After a few minutes, I went back to the Earl, who, with Warwick, was commanding on the left, near the marshes and the river. The insects were fierce, but the French were far away. We watched the Prince canter his beautiful black charger across the fields towards the Cardinal, who was sitting with his his French knights under a banner of truce.
The Earl and Warwick already knew we were going to move. Men ate hurriedly, but suddenly the whole army — at least, all the men I knew — were in tearing good spirits. We’d marched around the French, and the Black Prince, bless him, was doing the right thing: turning his backside and slipping away. We weren’t going to fight at all.
No one was more relieved than the same men and boys who’d been counting dead Frenchmen the night before, believe me. Sound familiar, messieurs?
Every man was standing by his fed and watered horse. Most men had at least a canteen full of water. We stood to our horses, ready to move.
The Prince cantered back across the fields. Men started cheering.
He was a fine sight, and we weren’t going to fight.
We cheered, too, and he vanished into the centre of the army. An army of 6,000 men is a little less than a mile long, all formed in order, and he wasn’t so very far away.
One of his squires galloped up to Warwick and bowed in the saddle.
Warwick laughed and waved to Oxford, who nodded and rode along the hillside to where I sat with his men-at-arms.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We will be leaving before the party.’
We all smiled, and the left wing of the army began to pick their way south, led by a dozen of the Prince’s elite archers. All we needed was to get across the swamp.
The ground to our left was a damp swamp — deeper than it should have been in early autumn. I rode with the Earl, because he was using me as a mounted messenger. I was, at least in his eyes, a squire. Squires are generally accounted among the men-at-arms and not the servants. Or so I chose to account myself.
At any rate, I was near the head of the column as we marched off to the left. Marched is the wrong term. We slithered and slid down the steep ridge, then we squelched our way through the reeds and mud. We weren’t moving very fast.
But I was nearly at the dry ground around the ford marked by the Prince’s archers — I could see them — when there was a great shout behind me. It was a panicked shout. We were strung out across the hillside in a loose column, four men wide, all mounted. Ahead of me I could see our baggage carts, already crossing the ford. The Prince had this one in the bag — he’d sent our baggage ahead.
Down in the reeds, I could see the hillside behind me, but I couldn’t see anything happening except the shouting of some of the men — mostly retinue archers — at the top of the ridge. They were pointing behind them.
‘Go see,’ the Earl said. I think he meant to send Beauchamp, but I had my horse turned out of the column and picking his way across the reeds before Beauchamp or Amble got the idea. In fact, I didn’t go back along the column — the horses were chewing the trail to a morass — but laboured across the marsh a few paces, then rode straight up the ridge.
The moment my head was clear of the reeds, I saw it all.
The French had attacked. Fast and hard, and well led. Their chivalry were coming straight as an arrow across the low valley that separated the Prince’s army from the ridge where Talleyrand had held his peace talk. They were mounted on armoured horses the size of dragons, and they made the earth shake, even from where I was.
Warwick was with the tail of our column and had seen the threat immediately. Whether by bad fortune or cunning plan, the French were attacking in two deep battles of cavalry, one aimed at the Prince, the other aimed at the gap where we’d left the line. So Warwick was dismounting his own retinue archers and all his men-at-arms to form a hasty line at the top of the ridge, slightly back to form a shallow ‘L’, with the Prince’s battle to cover our now naked left flank.
It takes a half a cup of wine to explain, but I saw it in one glance.
I rode back down the ridge to the Earl, who had already picked his way clear of the morass. I reined in, but my horse fidgeted — curvets, bites.
‘The French are attacking the ground we quit,’ I said. ‘My lord, Lord Warwick is forming a battle from the rear of our division. He will be hard pressed, and-’
The Earl was a young man, but old in war, and he didn’t need any more of his fifteen-year-old squire’s views. He raised his hand for silence and looked up the hill — he stood in his stirrups and looked at his column.
I watched him, and I watched John Hawkwood, who tugged his beard, reached down and loosened his sword in its scabbard.
The truth is, I was green as grass. It looked to me as if we were beaten, and I was on the edge of panic. But neither the young Earl nor the middle-aged professional seemed flustered. Rather, both of them wore the looks of men in a good game of chess — the Earl might have said ‘good move’ aloud.
My horse stopped fidgeting. You know why? Because I stopped fidgeting.
‘On me,’ the Earl shouted. He turned his horse’s head and began picking his way along the marsh, not up the hill.
As it was — certainly by the Earl’s intent — he had his picked men about him, but we were at the head of his elite archers, men who wore his livery. Men like Master Peter wore as much harness as a man-at-arms — Peter wore leg armour, a brigantine covered in red and yellow leather with rose-head rivets, a fine German basinet with a mail aventail. Most of his mates — the veteran archers — wore the same. The Earl had 120 of these men, and he had placed himself at their head when he called, ‘Follow me.’